Hunter Academy: Revenge of the Weakest novel Chapter 995

The hum faded. freёwebnoѵel.com

The last of the spectral readings blinked into place across Jules’s tablet, the sigils aligning in sequence like puzzle pieces locking into place. He let out a breath, his shoulders dropping.

"Alright," he said. "Confirmed. It’s stabilizing at Class-6. Deep-rank variance, minor oscillation—but nothing above tolerance."

Ryn rubbed the back of his neck, still tense. "Still doesn’t feel right."

Gellard finally lowered his scanner and exhaled through his nose. "Then maybe trust the gear instead of your gut, for once."

But the moment felt too clean. Too resolved.

And the sky agreed.

It began not with sound—but with absence. The wind dropped. The frostbitten air, which had gnawed at them relentlessly all night, suddenly fell still. A silence too complete. Too sudden.

Then—

KRACK.

A jagged bolt of lightning tore through the clouds above them. Not white. Not blue. Black.

It lanced across the sky with a sound like stone tearing through glass—and for a single instant, the slope, the gear, the faces of the team were all etched in silver.

"What—" Jules said, halfway to shielding his eyes.

And then the scanner screamed.

The runes across the stakes flared red. Not yellow. Not warning. Critical.

"Wait, what?" Jules stepped back instinctively, looking down at his screen. "No, no, that’s not—"

The numbers began to drop.

From Class-6, it blinked once.

Class-5.

Then again.

Class-4.

The resonance curve buckled in real-time. The pulses inverted, the energy stream folding in on itself like it was being compressed—like something inside was trying to hide.

"Is it collapsing?" Elena asked sharply, voice high and tight behind her scarf.

"No," Jules muttered, eyes glued to the impossible readout. "It’s not fading. The structure is still there. It’s not vanishing—it’s—"

"Bracing," Gellard finished, his voice low. Grim. "It’s changing its signature."

"But that doesn’t make sense!" Ryn barked. "Gates don’t just decrease in rank! That’s not how—"

WHUUMMM.

The gate’s perimeter stakes shuddered. Not visibly, not in the metal—but in their shadows. The dark cast beneath them wavered, flickering erratically, as if trying to pull inward toward some new center.

A hollow groan rolled up from the frozen soil.

Elena staggered back, her eyes locked on the center of the slope. "The ground—look at the ground."

A spiral was forming beneath the snow. Not drawn. Not carved. Melted. Steam hissed upward in thin, sinuous streams as heat and cold twisted around each other in silent war. At the center of it, the faintest shimmer hung in the air—like a ripple in water caught beneath glass.

The gate.

Except now, it twitched.

Ryn took an instinctive step back, nearly slipping on the slick snow. "Did it just twitch?"

"No," Jules muttered. "It reacted."

Gellard was already raising the comm unit to his shoulder, fingers working the mana dial embedded in its frame. "This is Field Recon Alpha-Seven—pinging HQ. We’ve got a gate fluctuation—repeat, a Class-6 gate is exhibiting anomalous behavior. Requesting protocol override and emergency extraction standby."

No reply.

He adjusted the crystal frequency, sharp now. "HQ, respond. Priority flag—unknown resonance event, possible breach instability."

Static.

A slow hiss crackled through the line, then broke entirely into silence.

Jules looked up from his tablet. "What the hell?"

Gellard’s hand clenched around the comm. He tapped the emergency beacon embedded in the main case, triggering the failsafe pulse. The flare of mana was supposed to launch a direct signal toward the closest Association repeater tower.

Instead, the beacon glowed once—then died.

"Dead," Gellard said, voice like stone. "The gate’s severed the connection."

"Is that even possible?" Elena asked.

"Not under normal protocols," Jules muttered. "But this? Nothing about this is normal."

The air had changed. It wasn’t just cold anymore—it was heavy. Intentional. The kind of stillness you only got when something was watching.

Watching and waiting.

"We shelter," Gellard said abruptly. "We wait for line restoration. No approaching the gate. No diagnostics. Pack gear, perimeter circle, twenty meters out. If this thing spikes again, I want buffers between it and us."

The team moved.

Jules and Elena scrambled to pack the scanners. Ryn activated his kinetic ward, a shimmer of violet glinting faintly around him as he backed away from the slope. Gellard remained planted near the edge, eyes locked on the ripple in the snow.

It no longer twitched.

It rested.

Minutes passed in the crawl of the windless dark.

Then, without fanfare, the sky cleared.